Lower arc, less talent.

You must be joking.


But then I recall your line about 50,000 good musicians and five record deals - summat like that - and I retreat to "Taste."

The Koerner Ray Glover stuff sounds closer to the source material, while Dylan puts more of his stamp on the folk blues canon. Though this is probably because Dylan isn't as good as sounding like a black sharecropper. He probably was trying to sound Koerner-esque on his first album, but he ends up sounding more like an exuberant white youngster doing some funny voices. I think this is a good thing.

Originality if often the result of screw-ups. That's how we got we got penicillin, that's how we got Schrödinger's wave equation, and that's how we got the blues.

Some of my fave singers are whites who try to sing like blacks but are hopelessly incompetent at it, like Bob Dylan or this guy -



or him too -



I think they're more interesting than the whites who are more successful at sounding black.

Interesting because incompetent? An interesting criterion of value. You get to laugh at them while admiring them...?

Nah, because they're not good enough imitators, they end up creating something new. See: the wackiness of Dylan's Gospel Plow for instance.

An interesting response, which doesn't take into account what I was responding to, from Uzi:

"Some of my fave singers are whites who try to sing like blacks but are hopelessly incompetent at it" - his example being David Bowie. Nobody argues interesting failures by competent people can produce progress; but failures by "hopelessly incompetent" people being faves? I dunno....

Heck, John, Uzi isn't saying Bowie is a 'hopelessly incompetent' person or singer or whatever, merely 'hopelessly incompetent at it', it being 'trying to sing like blacks' - so the 'screwing up' principle would appear to be well applicable. I disagree with Mr Bloodhound's proposal, but there ya go.

A bit of hyperbole to make a point, is all.

Hey! hyperbole is the bestest thing in the whole of creation for getting yer point across, ain't nothing comes near. No way.

I know. I've been told fifty million times not to exaggerate, too. All I did was quote the guy, jeez.

Koerner and Ray were both taken to task by critics for trying to sound black. Ray obviously was doing that (in a later interview he said he had been a "blues impersonator" in his early recordings), and I think (but am not certain) that Koerner was doing it too.

It's obvious in Ray's case, because he did it so well. I'm less sure about Koerner because, if he was trying to sound black, it wasn't working. Possibly he was just trying to sound folk (field-recording folk, that is, not Peter-Paul-and-Mary folk).

By the late '60s, both of them had reached a point where they sounded like themselves, with whatever they had been doing as imitators integrated into it.